Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star Read Online Free PDF Page B

judgments. She just loved me simply for who I am, her “sweet little Richie.”
    Years later, just weeks after I had gotten over my denial and finally admitted to myself I was gay, I went home for a Christmas visit. Just a few weeks before I took a long, hard look at myself in the mirror and said, “Rich Merritt, you’re a homosexual.” I was twenty-five, still in the Marine Corps, and I hadn’t come out to anyone else yet. While I was visiting my family I went to see Momma King and she told me a story about a relative of hers. She said, “You know he’s one of those homer-sexuals.” That’s the way she pronounced it. But then she quickly added, “But what do I know about that? He is my family and I love him—and you know we’re all God’s children, anyway.” God, I still cry when I think of that—to hear this old woman make that statement at that particular time in my life was just absolutely extraordinary. It was the first time I ever heard anyone back home say something so nonjudgmental about being gay.
    Yet her gentle statement also made me somewhat uneasy because it forced me to consider whether God approved or disapproved of what I felt and of what I had done. I had pushed that issue aside for months, and now here was this saintly woman adding new dimensions to my confusing thoughts.
    But that was all a long way in the future. Before kindergarten, my life had consisted of listening to my parents’ sweet voices read books to me, playing in the sandbox beneath the oak tree, catching lightning bugs at night, and curling up by the fireplace in the winter to watch cartoons and The Brady Bunch . Long summer days. Hot summer days. My cousins would come down and my mom would babysit for them. My mom’s side of the family was five miles up the road in nearby Powdersville, South Carolina, and we’d all play games under the trees in the backyard.
    It wasn’t always play. We’d have to work in the garden on those hot summer days, picking green beans and squash and okra. But even by doing that, we were in touch with nature and loving the outdoors, despite the mosquitoes and other bugs. I slept very well at night after playing and working so hard. I loved it all. Heaven really was a place on earth. I was happy. Life seemed easy.
    I’m telling you all of this so you get an idea of what my childhood was like. My life on the outside seemed very simple—it revolved around my immediate family and religion. To say it plainly, our religious faith was the center of the family. For example, my dad had taken an old antique wagon wheel from the 1800s, which—with some paint and glass—he converted into our coffee table. Placed on the center of this table, rather symbolically, were a family photo album and a large white Bible. Every night before we went to bed, we’d gather around that coffee table with my dad reading from the Bible and then we’d all pray. Our family devotions lasted from twenty minutes to an hour each night.
    From the time I was born until I was five, we were members of the Pentecostal Holiness Church which, to me, now seems really wacky; for example, people speaking in tongues and, in extreme cases, handling live snakes. (I never saw any snake handlers in person; we weren’t quite that backward.) My family went to church every Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night, and I was totally happy with it. I thought everyone did that because almost everyone I knew did do that. Even the members of my family who didn’t go to church paid lip service to God and Jesus and the Bible.
    Oh, it wasn’t all that extreme. Generations before, Pentecostals weren’t even allowed to see movies, dance, have parties, anything like that. Grandpa Schrader, who was Pentecostal, didn’t think women should wear makeup, have a perm, or have their hair colored. In my day, they were a little more lax about that kind of thing. My mom would say, “Any ol’ barn can use a coat of paint.”
    Along with The Brady Bunch